Battle joined

The least government can do is to pay polio workers in a timely manner and increase their wages from mere Rs250 a day.

Pakistan expects a lot from those who work on the polio vaccination campaigns — and pays them a pittance for putting their lives on the line when it bothers to pay them at all. A miserly Rs250 a day appears to be the going rate in most places and is worthy of urgent upwards revision. The polio epidemic is now gathering pace, with Pakistan said to be the world’s largest pool of the wild polio virus. The army has now been drawn into the battle to fight the disease that should have eradicated a decade ago. With 47 cases reported in the first quarter of the year countrywide but predominantly from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata); and Pakistan rapidly approaching pariah status vis-a-vis the rest of the world and our potential to export the disease, something has to be done and fast.



A meeting at the GHQ on April 17 between representatives of the army, the World Health Organisation (WHO), and the federal, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Fata secretariats, appears to have embraced a holistic approach. Of note is that the meeting was triggered by the ‘embarrassment’ that the possibility of other countries imposing travel restrictions would bring. One would have thought that a denting of the national image was a secondary matter when laid against the scale of the problem and the implications of failing to solve it.

Polio has now been added to the list of enemies that the army is to fight. The next polio drive is scheduled to start on April 27 and the army has said it is committed to providing ‘a conducive environment’ which will not include the provision of individual physical security for the at-risk workers going door to door. Given that it is the door-to-door part of the operation that has produced the most fatalities so far, one wonders at the effectiveness of whatever is being proposed. For Rs250 a day, the vaccinators will bravely go where few others venture. The least the governments, both federal and provincial, could do is pay them in a timely manner and increase this pittance of an amount. We manage to pay the army on time — so why not the vaccinators?

Published in The Express Tribune, April 19^th, 2014.

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